


equilibrium

by MathildaHilda



Series: until the end of infinity [10]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Captain America: The Winter Soldier Compliant, Character Study, Child Death, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Torture, Original Character Death(s), Original Character(s), POV Second Person, i will be bitter about this until the day i die
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-25
Updated: 2019-05-25
Packaged: 2020-03-17 09:52:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18962863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MathildaHilda/pseuds/MathildaHilda
Summary: You know death, but it does not favor you.





	equilibrium

**Author's Note:**

> Equilibrium; "a state of balance between opposing forces or actions that is either static (as in a body acted on by forces whose resultant is zero) or dynamic (as in a reversible chemical reaction when the rates of reaction in both directions are equal)"

Your father is a man and your mother is a woman; that’s all they are, and perhaps all they’ll ever be.

It doesn’t matter who they were. What their names were, their occupations, whether you were wanted or stolen from them.

(Your father’s name was Ivan. You learn this, when you face an almost dead man on a mountain top overlooking infinity.

You learn this, when it doesn’t matter so much.)

What matters is this; your name is yours, but so is every other girl’s name that you hear.

They don’t call you Natalia until you are almost six. It doesn’t matter what they called you before.

  


You’re five years old when you meet the girl with the black hair. The girl who smiles when one shouldn’t and can’t quite poise like all the other girls, no matter how many times Madame Belova snaps and reprimands.

You meet the girl, and you know they’ve named her Ana. She calls herself something else, but Ana is all you know.

Ana dies. You don’t.

You don’t learn why she dies until you’re too old to remember her face. You never remember what she used to call herself before Ana was what they made her.

  


You meet the Dog when you’re eight.

He’s too tall for you to greet in other ways than small gestures only he seems to catch. You smile at him once, and he doesn’t smile back, but perhaps you knew then that he would remember that smile until they froze him again.

  


You kill your first girl when you're ten; snaps her tiny, fragile neck with a twist and a turn, and leaves her on the floor for Madame Belova to see.

The Dog looks at you, same as he always does and always looks at all the others, but his eyes are different; not cold like the Russian winter you have traveled through more than once, but simply thawed and aching like the first bursts of flowers in the early light of spring.

You look at him, and then you don't see him for four years. You look at him, and you think you see pity.

  


The dark has always been too bright.

The other girls sends you first, pushes you past the door because they refuse to face Madame Belova’s wrath once you have failed.

You scrub the blood from his broken nose with a cloth dipped in ice water, doesn’t move away when he tries to knock you down with what remains of his arm, and you wipe away the ugly bruises as best you can.

They’ve taken parts of the arm away again, but he’s still stronger than you could ever hope to be.

He’s stronger, but you’re faster, so it’s only a matter of time before you’ve wrenched him onto his stomach on the floor; small, pitiful sounds strangles themselves on his lips, created from unspoken horrors of years past.

You don’t pity him then. The Dog brought this on himself.

(That still doesn’t mean he deserved it.)

You don’t fail in cleaning him up enough for the men in the tailored suits. You don’t fail in calming him enough so that he won’t kill you as soon as you move too much to his left and almost allows his arm to slip free.

You almost wish you had failed, later, when you read what they made him do.

  


They send you eastward; you and two other girls.

The Dog is there when you arrive, a muzzle trapping his face, and you see one of the girls - newer, not very tactical - flinch at the sight of him.

But not you. Or the other girl. You greet him the same way everyone does, and you don’t think he knows that you call him  _Dog._

The Dog kills a man in a tailored suit, and the flinching girl begs for someone that doesn’t exist to anyone but her imagination.

You kill the man’s son; younger than you and with eyes almost as dark as yours.

The other girl hits the wall with a thump when she kills the flinching girl.

You think you are sixteen.

  


You only knock him down when he lets you.

And he only lets you beat him twice.

You don’t see him again after that second time.

  


Your fear makes you stronger, even after you have learned to never let your fear control you.

You are still afraid, still bleeding when you rip a stitch because the pain makes it harder to concentrate, and you are still sad over a future you knew you’d never have, when you kill Evelina.

She stole your gun.

You pull her knife from her boot.

Madame Belova smiles at you, and forces you to pull another comrade through the halls.

(You are not friends. You are not sisters.

This is a game, and you’re winning.)

  


It’s not really a ceremony. It’s reminds you much more of those funerals you’ve watched from afar, when the Dog seemed to slumber in a corner and his handler watched the same thing as you.

You don’t remember how many girls there had been. You only remember that there are a lot fewer of you now than there had been before.

Madame Belova almost smiles sincerely; pretend or not, as she hands you the badge.

Your name is Black Widow now, and so you clip the badge to your belt, and doesn’t smile.

  


Volgograd is a nightmare.

You’ve had plenty of those, but Volgograd is something so drastically different that it takes you a moment to realize that it is, in fact, not a dream of any kind.

It’s you, your handler and your target. And a man with a bow and arrow, asking you to stand down and leave.

Leave Volgograd;  _‘no need to drop your gun, take those with you, but leave this whole thing behind.’_

Leave, with him, and take part in protecting those who can’t protect themselves.

The man is there to stop you, but he’s not there to kill you unless he has to. He’s simply there to protect.

(Simply there, on orders to take you down. You know this before he lies to you. But it’s a good lie, and you both turn it into truth.)

So, you pull the comm from your ear, holster one gun and holds the other close, and steps onboard a plane.

A plane, traveling to a place you never quite learn to understand.

 

 

You know it’s him. You always do.

The scientist shouts curses when you lose control and your car loses road entirely, tumbling down and down and down until all that remains is a heap of bent metal and a space filled up completely of airbags.

You grip your gun, grips the scientist, and tries to save his life.

In the end, all you’re left with is one more of the Dog’s lessons.

  


Tony Stark is a genius. And an idiot.

That doesn’t mean he’s not one of the few you would gladly fight besides, if the end were to come quicker than either of you foresaw.

So, when Tony Stark sends a nuke back through the wormhole that’s been spitting out aliens for hours and hours (that might just be minutes, but who knows), you’re prepared to attend a funeral that has all the pieces all those little girls didn’t have.

There are no funerals for those you know. For others it is, and you visit a few. (The mother in Queens refuses to look at you, knowing, just like everyone else, that the one thing heroes are supposed to do, is to keep little girls from dying.)

There are no funerals for those you know; just shawarma and a bone aching need for sleep.

  


It doesn’t matter how many times you try. You keep coming back to the name  _Dog._ It’s not a name, but it was what you gave him all those years ago when name had very little meaning unless you knew how to use them correctly.

You call him  _the Soldier_ when you have to, but he was no more a soldier than you. You were both puppets on strings, puppetered by people who had bigger goals than your own two lives.

You never call him  _James,_ or  _Bucky._ Maybe  _Barnes,_ when both you and Steve learns who he is.

You wish you could take it back. All of it. But you knew, from the moment he threw you from his shoulders on the overpass, that he never would remember you the same.

Memory, after all, is a fickle thing.

  


Bruce has always been kind, even when he calls himself a monster. He’s a genius, and a little bit like Stark in all the ways he’s not, and you find, soon enough, that you don’t mind that as much as you thought you initially would.

He’s a sweet soul, and he makes you smile, even when he manages to mess up the coffee machine in the Tower for the third time in two days, and almost ruins coffee for Thor once and for all.

The Hulk doesn’t scare you like he used to; that uncontrollable anger you so often felt yourself, exposed like a raw nerve when prodded for too long, transformed into the very embodiment of the emotion.

Maybe you love him a little, or maybe you love him a lot, but you will always know this; love is a sweet sound and an even sweeter feeling.

But it hurts so goddamn much.

Madame Belova had frightened you with stories of what men could do to little girls; you just never imagined your strange little feeling to steal your heart away from you in a quinjet.

  


You’re not familiar with the feeling of losing someone you’ve loved your whole life, so the most you can do is play along as sincerely as you can when the new King vows revenge for his father.

You’re not familiar with the loss of family, but you know its face when you face both Steve and Clint on the other side of a tarmac; Wanda is there, and so is Barnes, but these are two entirely different kinds of loss.

You fight your family with yet another stranger by your side, who you learn, pretty fast, is a kid who can’t possibly be older than sixteen.

You killed people at sixteen, and felt a sense of glee. This kid jumps from plane to person to building, laughing and joking as he goes, and you’re not entirely sure just how you’re supposed to react when the giant slaps him aside.

(Tony’s voice is broken when he steps of a ship, two years later, and tells you how he lost the kid.

You didn’t know him, but now you wish you had.)

 

You find Steve by Wakanda’s border, eyes locked on the small goats stepping out of their huts for the very first time, and asks him for a plan.

There are a lot of plans, a lot of trips and a lot of fights for those who are unseen and needs your help.

And then, everything dies. (Well, almost everything.)

  


When Steve rolls Vision over, surrounded by flakes of gray and dulled green leaves, your heart, however hidden, drops.

You had seen a woman disappear before your eyes, her own eyes wild and confused and yours just as scared, and you had reached for her as she had reached for you, but nothing you knew could have saved her.

You find Fury’s pager in the streets, having followed the last known locations for so many people lost in so short a time. You find it, keeps it alive indefinitely, and lets it die when Carol steps through the door, asking for an answer.

She asks, and you all comply.

She brings Tony home some few days later.

  


You fly to space twice in your lifetime, and twice is enough.

Thanos dies the first time.

(The second time, the stars take a gamble and allows you the one thing you have wanted for a very long time.)

  


You meet Bruce again, and loses almost everything in the process.

You meet up now and again, at the coffee house in Midtown you both found out that you liked through an odd game of Twenty Questions., and talk about nothings and everythings that makes very little sense based on where you choose to spend your afternoons.

He calls you second, after Tony, when he merges fully with the Hulk, and you buy him a green tea in congratulations.

It’s a joke, and it’s a sense of declaration.

  


It’s a little like a mirror when you find Clint, blade raised and a man bleeding out by his feet.

The only difference here was that he had stopped you from killing your target. But you weren’t really sure if you were too late to stop him, or simply allowed him to enact what he wanted.

(It doesn’t matter if the man survives; a strike like that and he won’t survive for long.)

You bring him home, just like he once brought you home, and it only brings you closer to the end.

  


You know death, but it does not favor you.

You have stared the dead in the face, and have hoped they never come for you.

And here you stand, staring something long dead,  _almost_ dead, in the face, and hopes that this is the final verse.

You read the story about the man who vanished with Captain America, and you know that the cloaked skull is that very same man.

  


You were born in the snow; cold and lifelike and deadly, and that is where you end.

( _It’s not really the same, but it is poetic in its own sense, don’t you think?)_

  


The woman with the green skin flickers in and out for a while, and then she’s gone all together; memory trapped in stone finally set free.

You give Steve an unseen smile when he returns the stone. You don’t come back, but something pulls you up and down and away and close.

Something pulls you home.

**Author's Note:**

> The woman shown in Natasha's memory/dream/something in Age of Ultron is only credited as Madame B. in the sources I could find, so I took some liberties and gave her the name "Belova", as a small nod to the second Black Widow; Yelena Belova, who first appeared in "Inhumans" #5
> 
> My [Tumblr](http://mathildahilda.tumblr.com)


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